


Nastya and Jonny go planetside, what crimes will they commit? (murder)

by The_random_Ravenclaw



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: (Spoilers it's Jonny), Attempt at Humor, Banter, But not that much there's also lots of sibling banter, Gen, Jonny d'Ville and Nastya Rasputina are Siblings, Murder, Musings on morality and lack thereof, Nastya commits her first murder, Not very graphic but I put the archive warning there just in case, Set in the early days when there's only them, Sibling bonding time (they buy a gun), Temporary Character Death, The Mechanisms-Typical Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:48:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28454862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_random_Ravenclaw/pseuds/The_random_Ravenclaw
Summary: “You’re boring Nastya” He seemed to scan the nearby shops for something and lit up when he saw one that sold weapons. “We should get you something fun for that money instead, like a gun. You don’t have one yet, do you?”In which Nastya gets a gun and commits her first murder
Relationships: Jonny d'Ville & Nastya Rasputina, The Aurora/Nastya Rasputina (pre-relationship)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 40





	Nastya and Jonny go planetside, what crimes will they commit? (murder)

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This was originally supposed to be part of a fic about the first time each of the mechs killed, but I don't want to write that anymore, so I rewrote this to be a stand-alone instead. I hope you'll like it!

At what point does causing another person to die make you a murderer? In the beginning of her eternal life it was something that Nastya thought about quite a lot. Who was the first person she actually killed?

Did she kill her family by stopping her father from deleting the protestors? If she hadn’t done it they would’ve lived for a little longer, but there was no way for her to know that, was there? So no, she didn’t kill them, not in a way that counts.

Did she kill Yenin? His mind lived on in the virtual world after she shot him, so did he actually die? No, even though he almost died at her hand, he actually didn’t. She wasn’t a murderer before her blood was replaced with cold mercury and death suddenly wasn’t an issue anymore.

Does killing Jonny for being annoying count? No, he comes back again afterwards, so she hasn’t caused anyone to truly die by killing him. It did the job of desensitising her to murder and violence though.

No, the person Nastya counts as her first real murder victim died on a small planet far from Cyberia a few years after she was mechanised.

Doctor Carmilla had sent her and Jonny to get some spare parts for the Aurora, so they were traversing the small cobbled streets of a mostly idyllic town in search of an electronics shop. It was one of the first times Nastya had gone planetside and Jonny had been excited to “show her how to have fun”, which probably meant dragging her to a bar fight or something equally violent. 

Even though they’d only known each other for a few years they’d become very close despite their many differences and the fact that none of them were very good at this whole friendship thing. It was probably a result of being two out of the three who’d spend eternity together (Nastya wasn’t sure of how she felt about that yet, but she supposed she’d have enough time to decide on it later).

“No Jonny, you can’t run off and commit crimes now, you need to help me carry the parts back. They’re too many for one person,” Nastya said, already resigned to the difficult task of keeping Jonny on track until they had the parts. That wasn’t the whole truth, but   
Jonny didn’t need to know that she didn’t want to be alone on a strange planet and that she wanted his company.

“Why not,” Jonny said. “I’m bored” 

Of course he was bored, that insufferable bastard. Couldn’t he just do what the Doc had asked for once and help her? “We could rob the store instead of paying if that makes it more interesting to you.”

“Wait, you were actually planning on paying?” He sounded extremely confused at the concept of not stealing. “Do you even have the right currency for this planet?”

“Yes, the Doc gave me some when she asked us to get the parts. You would’ve known if you had listened.”

“You’re boring Nastya” He seemed to scan the nearby shops for something and lit up when he saw one that sold weapons. “We should get you something fun for that money instead, like a gun. You don’t have one yet, do you?”

She let out a tired sigh and pinched her nose in frustration. “And why Jonny, should I get a gun? You’re the one who likes to shoot people, not me”

“You just haven’t tried it yet, I promise it’ll be fun.” He paused for a few seconds before continuing. “Think of it like this, you could just shoot me when I’m being annoying instead of bashing my head in with a whatever that tool is called. I prefer gunshot wounds, they hurt less and you don’t have to chase me. It’s a win-win situation.”

“It was a wrench Jonny” she said in exasperation. “And just so you know, what you just said would make me seriously worried about your mental state if it wasn’t for the fact that I know you and that we’re immortal. Still, a gun seems pretty tempting when you put it like that though, it _would_ be less of an effort for me to kill you.”

“I knew you’d agree”, he exclaimed, clearly excited, and started dragging her towards the small store.

“Look Jonny, I never agreed to this. Can’t we just steal the parts and get back to Aurora as soon as possible?” She didn’t want to be late and Aurora had promised to tell her how to make the repairs, and she was excited to try. She could finally do something real and learn to be the engineer Doctor Carmilla wanted her to be (And if it also had something to do with how intimate it was to make repairs to a certain spaceship, none other than her needed to know).

Jonny stopped and turned around to look at her with a glint in his eye, still holding a firm grip on her wrist. “Oh I see how it is,” he said in an unnecessarily dramatic tone. “You just want to get back to your spaceship girlfriend as soon as possible. You don’t want to spend time with me, your dearest friend, anymore. And no, I don’t want to know about what you do with her, I’ve seen the way you look at her machinery and that’s more than I ever wanted to know.”

She blushed (It was weird how she still did that considering her blood was literally metal, but she shouldn’t be able to come back from death either so logic probably didn’t apply to her anymore). “Aurora and I are not dating, Jonny.” She glared at him to hammer in the point. (Not dating _yet_ , her brain supplied, but she quickly shoved that thought away)

“You’re blushing Nastya,” he deadpanned. 

Nastya very much wished that she could just shoot him to make him shut up. “Let’s go buy a fucking gun Jonny, you wanted to do that, right?” she said and started to walk in the direction of the weapons store. He apparently decided to drop the subject and let go of her wrist to follow her.

The bell on the door jingled as they went inside. It was dark compared to the bright spring day outside, but as her eyes adjusted Nastya could see rows upon rows of different firearms hanging on the walls. 

The person behind the counter, an elderly man, spoke up “Do you need any help?”

“No, we’ll be fine on our own” Jonny said and gave him a polite smile. He must be in a very good mood then, since getting Jonny to act polite wasn’t the easiest task. He hadn’t even threatened the man.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Nastya whispered to him as they made their way to the section where the pistols were. 

“Do what?”

“Be polite” 

“Fuck off” He sounded annoyed and shoved her a little with his shoulder, but Nastya thought she could almost detect a fond tone somewhere. 

Sometimes she wondered why he still kept up the appearance of not having any emotions around her, given that they’d seen each other vulnerable many times before. Both of them had comforted the other after nightmares or after the times Carmilla decided that their mechanisms needed some tweaking or maintenance.

They started to try out a few guns, with Jonny providing a mix of stupid comments and actually helpful tips. After almost twenty minutes she found one she liked and they made their way to the counter. 

It was an old-fashioned gun with a wooden handle, looking a lot like the ones Jonny usually used, but it was newer and had a cool engraving of stars on the side. She could’ve chosen something more high-tech of course, but this one reminded her of her new family instead the old life she’d left far behind.

“I’d like to buy this one please,” Nastya said as she put the gun on the counter and took out the wad of money from her pocket. She put the amount needed and a little bit more beside the gun. 

“Okay, can you show me your identification and weapons licence?” The owner said.

Nastya glanced over at Jonny and mimed a silent ‘what do we do’ at him. None of them had any ID, or at least not one that would work on this planet and they definitely didn’t have a weapons licence. Maybe they should’ve planned for this before deciding to buy a gun.

“Look, we don’t have any– “Jonny started, before the owner cut him off.

“Well, then I can’t sell you the gun. Either you have the proper documents or I refuse to sell.”

“I can give you more money than this” Nastya tried. “I have a couple thousand more here.” She held up the wad of money that she had left.

“Don’t try that with me kid. I don’t sell to people without the proper documents, so I suggest you leave. Come back when you’ve gone through the background screening and training you’d need for the weapons licence and try again”

Jonny responded by pulling up his own gun and shot the man in the head. As he fell dead to the floor in a spray of blood, Jonny started to search through the man’s desk for the tools to remove the security lock on Nastya’s gun.

“You– you just killed him” she said, staring at the brain matter coating the desk. She knew on a theoretical plane that Jonny killed others and had even been on the receiving end of it more than once, but it was different to see him in action, killing a man that wouldn’t come back in cold blood. She should probably be even more bothered by it than she was, but she’d already accepted that murder was something Jonny did so this wasn’t as big of a deal as it could’ve been.

“Yes I did Nastya.” He said calmly “You’ve known me for a few years now, you know I kill people for fun. Hell, I even had a good reason this time. Why does it bother you so much, you’ve killed me several times before.” He finally found the tools and started to remove the security lock.

”He’s not coming back. You do.” She was starting to get a little bit more upset than before. Maybe it was just a futile effort by the scraps of a moral she still had left that told her that she should be more upset by this, but still. 

“How can you act like this is nothing? You just took his life and you aren’t even bothered by it. Do you even feel anything about killing anymore?”

At once he turned serious and looked her in the eye. “Not anymore. After some time you get used to it. To the look in their eye before they die. You learn to live with it in the beginning and then you stop caring. Sometimes I forget how new you are to this… to immortality. That you still care. It’s stupid if you ask me, much easier to stop. It’ll make eternity more bearable”

A moment of silence passed between them. Nastya had a feeling that he wasn’t telling the whole truth, that maybe there was some sliver of empathy for those he killed buried deep inside him or another reason than immortality for how he could kill without guilt, but she had no intentions of asking him about it. She didn’t want to get shot and besides, they had some parts to get.

Sometimes she wondered how long Jonny had lived with doctor Carmilla before she joined them. He couldn’t have been older than twenty when he was mechanised, but that said nothing about how long he’d lived since then. How much time had it taken to get used to killing? From offhand comments she’d deduced that he was at least a few decades older than her, maybe even a century. 

Sometimes his young looks made it easy to forget how much older than her he was, but she knew that over time, that difference wouldn’t matter. It was terrifying to think about how little those decades would matter compared to her total lifespan when at the moment she’d barely lived for twenty years. 

It had been hard enough to imagine how long a normal lifespan would be back when she was still mortal, but now she’d live forever. Eternity is hard to grasp if you think about it for too long. At what point should she stop counting her age? Nastya felt an existential crisis coming and decided to think about it later instead. She had more important things to do right now. 

“You done with that gun?” She asked and briefly wondered at what point murder had become such a trivial thing that they could leave it at that. 

He looked it over and handed it to her. “Grab some ammunition from that shelf while we’re still in here.”

She did so and made sure that her new gun was loaded before putting it in her belt. She’d have to get a holster for it later. 

They walked out of the store leaving the money behind on the counter. Whoever found the corpse probably deserved it as compensation. The weird mood from before was forgotten and they joked with each other as they walked through the sunshine in search of an electronics shop.

Soon enough they found a small electronics shop with a glowing sign that read “Kjell’s electronics” and went inside. There were shelves upon shelves of different machine and computer parts covering every square meter of the shop.

“Will you find what you need here?” Jonny asked.

Nastya, who’d already picked up a shopping cart and had begun to browse the shelves for the parts on her list answered him, somewhat distractedly. “Oh yes, I think so. Shouldn’t take more than ten minutes, I hope you can cope with the boredom of waiting for that long”

While Nastya continued to scan the shelves, occasionally grabbing a part, Jonny leaned against the wall closest to the counter. He started to whistle some obnoxious tune, ignoring the way that the woman behind the counter glared daggers at him. That probably was the point of it Nastya thought and fondly rolled her eyes at her friend’s antics. 

She reached for the last piece of machinery she needed and put it on top of the small mountain of electronics in the cart and briefly considered the alternatives of how to go about this robbery. 

They could either leave now with the cart, or she could get the parts packaged. That wouldn’t be as easy to carry as the cart, but less suspicious and they wouldn’t have to worry about what to do with the shopping cart later. She decided on the latter, because then Jonny got to threaten someone with a gun and probably wouldn’t complain too much about helping her carry the parts back.

Jonny stopped whistling as Nastya approached the counter. “You ready?” he asked, hand on his gun.

“Not yet, I’ll tell you when I’m ready” she replied. Hopefully Jonny would get the hint and not start the robbery before she’d gotten the parts packaged. She tried to shush the part of her brain that whispered about how she shouldn’t consider this an okay thing to do.

“Hello”, she said with a polite smile to the cashier, who began to scan and wrap the parts in protective packaging. She didn’t reply, probably because she was too aggravated by Jonny. Her opinion of them didn’t matter anyways, since it was about to get even worse.

“That will be 1 500 space dollars” the cashier said, finally looking up at her.

“Now Jonny” Nastya said and took a step back as he pointed his gun at the cashier. The tell-tale click of the safety echoed out into the silent shop.

“Congratulations, this is now a robbery.” Jonny grinned and waved his gun a little. “You will stay right where you are and let us leave with all this junk or I’ll shoot you. Understood?” 

The woman nodded and Nastya took a step towards the packaged parts to retrieve them. None of them noticed that the woman had her hands under the desk and seemed to fiddle with something. In a smooth movement she pulled out a gun of her own and shot Jonny right in the chest. He hit the floor with a thud, a red stain spreading on his white shirt.

At once, Nastya was filled with rage. How dare this woman kill him? Kill her best friend, no, her _brother_. At this point they were siblings in all but blood (although a tired Jonny once joked that she was the metal blood to his metal heart, that they _matched_ , before falling asleep on her). 

Sure, he was annoying as fuck and she’d killed him herself several times before, but this woman had no right to do it, she was an outsider. He would come back in a moment and Nastya could see in the corner of her eye that he’d already started to stir, but that didn’t matter. No outsider was allowed to kill her brother. 

The cashier looked at Jonny as if in shock, either from killing for the first time or from the gradual realisation that it hadn’t stuck (or both). Nastya didn’t care. She fumbled a bit as she pulled out her new gun and aimed right at her head. The woman neither saw nor heard her fire until it was too late and the bullet hit its target. She fell dead to the floor as brain matter coated the wall behind and the shop once again fell silent. 

Then it hit Nastya. She’d killed someone, someone who wouldn’t come back in one way or another. She couldn’t even justify it with self-defence since both she and Jonny were immortal. It had been purely out of convenience and revenge. 

It wasn’t the act of killing itself that scared her, it was how little it bothered her. Shouldn’t she be more horrified at herself and what she’d done? Shouldn’t she be having some kind of existential crisis or start to panic? At what point had killing for convenience become something she’d do?

She used to be afraid of death, and princess Anastasia of Cyberia never wanted to hurt others. But she wasn’t that person anymore and death was merely an inconvenience for her now. She’d come a long way in only a few years and this wasn’t exactly a surprising development. Maybe it wouldn’t be that hard to stop caring after all. 

A groan from Jonny distracted her from her thoughts. He slowly sat up and rubbed at his chest. “Damn, that was rude. Didn’t even know she had a gun. What happened when I was out?”

He looked between Nastya, still pointing her new gun towards the counter, and the blood and brains that stained the wall. “Oh”

Nastya swallowed and replied “Yes, that happened. You okay?” She didn’t want to talk about it more than necessary.

“Like that’s the important question here, but I’m fine. We’re immortal you know. Wanna talk about it?” His sudden sincerity surprised Nastya. She’d half expected him to make some stupid joke about it and continue his habit of avoiding emotions when possible.

“I’m good for now I think. If you take those boxes over there I’ll take these and we can get out of here” Nastya gestured at two stacks of boxes that thankfully only had a few specks of blood here and there.

“If you say so,” He shrugged and picked up the boxes with surprisingly little complaint. 

“You said I’ll get used to it. Killing I mean. I suppose I already have to some extent, just by this life we’re living. No use in talking about it now, I’d rather go before someone else comes here because they heard gunshots. We can’t carry these back if we’re chased by the police”

“Boring, being chased by police is fun, but I see your point. Do these boxes cover my blood stain if I carry them like this?”

Nastya glanced over at him “If you don’t look too closely.”

And so they walked back out into the sunshine, leaving another shop with a cooling body inside it behind them. It was the first person Nastya truly killed, but far from the last.

**Author's Note:**

> That's it, I hope you enjoyed! If you did, please consider leaving kudos or a comment because those makes my day.
> 
> If you'd like to, come talk to me on tumblr [ @therandomravenclw ](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/therandomravenclw)


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